Quotes about Authenticity

Please remember that you don't have to be like someone else to be acceptable. The world's standards are not God's. The world may say you need to be like this person or that person, but God's will is that you be yourself. I

Confidence allows us to face life with boldness, openness, and honesty. It enables us to live without worry and to feel safe. It enables us to live authentically.

Notice there's nothing provided to protect our backside! That's because God never intended us to run from our enemies. His plan was and still is that, with Him at our side, we confront any issue in our life that is a problem. People are so skilled at not facing real issues, and they're even better at trying to cover them up by living make-believe lives and inventing false personalities. It is time to take a stand and confront fear!

Occasionally we see "shooting stars" in ministry—people who come out of seemingly nowhere and practically overnight are known worldwide, usually because they happened to get in with a certain group of people who had an ability to open doors for them. Rarely do their ministries last. They often get into trouble financially or morally because character is built during the hard times of waiting, but they didn't go through that character-building time.

Our lives improve only when we take chances -- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

It is too embarrassing to name and own one's deep failings; as long as they are unvoiced, we may be allowed to pretend it is not so.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity.

Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion and justice cannot be faithful worship of YHWH. The offer is a phony Sabbath!

But this is real prayer, down and dirty. It is not nice church prayer that refuses to ask anything because we mostly do not believe that prayers are heard or answered.

The key insight is that honest talk transforms and emancipates when it is received in faithful seriousness.

Humanness depends on being faithfully heard. And being faithfully heard depends on risky speech of self-disclosure uttered in freedom before a faithful listener.

I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.